American politics

Obamacare repeal

The zombie DMV

RIFFING off of something Paul Krugman noticed yesterday, I'd like to propose a modest addition to the category of "zombie ideas": the use of the Department of Motor Vehicles as a synecdoche for "infuriatingly incompetent bureaucratic agency that wastes lots of your time on complicated folderol". This has come up a lot in the years-long argument over Obamacare, with opponents warning that the plan will turn America's health-care system into the DMV. "DMV" was a stand-up-comedy byword for "time-wasting red tape" in the Johnny Carson era, but things have gotten a lot better over the past few decades and it seems high time to retire the reference.

There was certainly a time when visiting the DMV really was infuriating. I remember waiting a long time to get my first driver's license processed in Washington, DC, back in the mid-1980s. I started noticing improvements in New York City in the early 1990s, with the introduction of digital cameras that stored your picture with the rest of your computerised information, though the wait times in Manhattan were still pretty long. Since the early 2000s, meanwhile, my interactions with the DMV have been quick, efficient and friendly. The wait times have been brief, records are accurate, and procedures are simple and can usually be carried out via reasonably well-designed websites when they don't require a personal appearance.

I've never found dealing with DMV particularly difficult, even in California. But a more apt comparison is with the Social Security Administration. Since recently qualifying for Social Security and Medicare, I have found that the SSA is much easier to deal with than my private health insurance companies have ever been. If this were important, it would be an argument for nationalized health insurance along the lines of Social Security, which the Affordable Care Act is not.

Having gotten licences in both D.C. and Virginia in recent years, I have to say that the difference between the two is stark. D.C. I had to spend 4+ hours on two separate occasions to get my license (with a clean record); one DMV drone claimed I needed an extra document and had to come back. After doing so, the drone I got the second time told me that, no, I didn't need that document after all.

When I went to get my Virginia license after moving, I made sure to bring a big, thick book to read in the waiting room. They called my name before I was even finished filling out the form.

D.C. wait time: 4+ hours (x 2!)
Virginia wait time: 4 minutes

And they've opened a new DMV closer to me in Virginia, so the next time I have to deal with them it'll be even easier.

D.C. made me want to set the building on fire. Virginia made me want to hug everyone at the DMV.

She has been dealing directly with the billing department (at the Cleveland Clinic) all this time. They maintain one account per person but seem perpetually unable to apply payments to the proper accounts.

Perhaps ironically, my wife holds several advanced medical degrees and works in the health care field. Her experiences as both provider and consumer have convinced her that a nationalized single-payer system is our only hope of vaguely rational cost-effective health care.

DMV in California? You can make an appointment that is kept far better than any doctor's office I have ever visited. Most of the time, one's transaction can be done simply and quickly over the internet. I have found it a model of efficiency, actually.

There's a very important distinction between bureaucratic efficiency and monetary efficiency . Just because something costs less doesn't mean it's actually more efficient.

A knife is cheaper in every single way than a gun-- but despite this, the military still issues guns as the primary weapon of modern soldiers, because guns are more efficient than knives. A bike is cheaper than a car, but a car is still more efficient in terms of the amount of effort it takes to get from point A to point B (as well as environmental protection from cold/heat/rain/etc). And so on and so forth.

It might cost less to hire people who don't speak your language, are from a different culture, and don't have any personal relationship or knowledge of how your organization works, but it'll still be less efficient.

In Georgia, the DOT was partially privatized and you can (or could) renew your license and do other stuff at a kiosk in some Kroger stores. I had a boss who pointed out that you can buy your groceries in that store in 5 minutes but it still takes (or took) half an hour to do anything at the DOT inside of a Kroger store.

One problem with any government service whether privatized or not is, as someone else said below, a government function, whether privatized or not, they can't refuse or discourage service or price themselves out of segments of the market. CVS is not fast if you are in line behind someone who thinks the co-pay seems high and one thing that slows the wait time down at the DMV/DOT is the person who doesn't think they should have to fill out the form or finds it outrageous that they are expected to have documentation.

Another thing is that matters of public safety are always overdone because we complain chronically about red tape but acutely when someone gets a driver's license that, in retrospect, we shouldn't have had one, like an undocumented immigrant who goes on to crash his car into a schoolbus. So a big source of inefficiency will always be more security than the market would have provided but for public safety stuff, if we want the government involved, that will always be the price.

My experience is similar. In fact, in less than the amount of time my wife has spent unsuccessfully trying to get a private-sector health care provider to fix our billing—to the point that they’ve sent us to collections while showing a multi-hundred-dollar credit on one of our accounts—I’ve interacted with the Ohio DMV, the IRS, the Ohio taxation authority, and the California Franchise Tax Board, all with courtesy and efficiency and satisfactory resolutions all ’round.

Disneyland is great, but the lines are worse there than the DMV and, in the end, you aren't sanctioned to do anything dangerous. Also, if you are not on the southern california pass (and a weekly visitor,) then one day in Disneyland costs as much as a lifetime of driving.

Perhaps another "zombie idea" to retire is that the current market for health care and health insurance is anything close to a free market. I have seen that used as a justification for increasing layers of regulation, e.g. Obamacare is necessary to correct market failures.

They are not market failures; they are corrupted incentives and/or unintended consequences of existing rules and regulations regarding how we consume health care.

The DMV in NY has certainly improved but you're asking us to stop complaining because the DMV is only half as terrible now? A private business with similar traffic would be expected to stay open past 4PM, open on weekends, have more than a couple locations per county, and conduct more business online.

But there's another reason why I see a constant stream of anti-DMV posts on Facebook. The DMV itself is one giant red tape. I also have complaints about state-mandated car inspections conducted by private businesses. It's not like we're waiting on line to buy the new iPhone. We aren't getting anything of personal value (though there is some larger social value). We're merely trying to obtain something the state says we need, possibly to avoid a fine. An exaggerated analogy would be if the state required a license to run on public sidewalks. No matter how efficient the process of obtaining a license is, it's still bureaucratic red tape.

No, I'm not saying we should abolish driver's licenses but considering how the benefits are diffuse while the costs personal, any inconvenience will naturally be complained about. You can try to convince people that they shouldn't complain because their inconvenience ensures everyone's safety. Then you'll only have to convince them that the DMV is actually run efficiently.

Ash, there is a pretty healthy amount of theory and data that can predict some of this. Government is good at providing "public goods," and is the only sanctioned regulator of things that really need universal regulation. Things like the military, law enforcement, public roads and telling everyone they are special are things that, left entirely to the free market, we would have less of than we'd like. Apparently that is also true of scolding.

I think when the best solution is some service both universal and predictable, government is better at providing that than the private sector. When things need tailoring or have very small numbers of people who want them, the private sector is better at providing that. When things need tailoring and very small numbers of people who need them, that seems to work best with government and the private sector in partnership.